Post by Capo on Jul 28, 2007 15:33:43 GMT
Blackmail
Alfred Hitchcock 1929 UK
A woman kills a man in self-defence, and her detective boyfriend realises she did it; quick to hide evidence, a witness decides he can make a few pounds from them…
Hitchcock's best film by far for British International Pictures, his first (and with it, Britain's) first venture into feature talkies. It's through this new innovation that provides the film with its best or most memorable moments, too: the struggle and screams of a woman in peril and her artist seducer, off screen and veiled by a violently swaying curtain (because we now have sound as well as visuals to denote action); in another scene, as the camera dwells on our victim/killer's guilty face, who is about to cut bread, the monotonous monologue of a local gossip is muffled entirely save for the repeated use of the word "knife", heightening both the on-screen character's guilt and our sympathy for her; and also, in the lack of sound, in order to invoke tension - in one scene in particular, when our lovers are initially blackmailed in the empty (and silent) store, with acres of space between the three of them and the traffic from outside heard only when the entrance is opened. It's doubly interesting throughout, being both an amalgamation of Hitchcock's European aesthetic influences (British documentary, Soviet montage, German expressionism (which in turn define British national cinema at the time)), and in its complex and invitingly ambiguous moral (dis)solution: at the end of it all, the lowly blackmailer is dead and forgotten, with the policeman and his lover the ones who deviate from the truth and make it to their own ends - and therefore a shift in audience sympathies. It's one of his most subtle and impressive works.
Alfred Hitchcock 1929 UK
A woman kills a man in self-defence, and her detective boyfriend realises she did it; quick to hide evidence, a witness decides he can make a few pounds from them…
Hitchcock's best film by far for British International Pictures, his first (and with it, Britain's) first venture into feature talkies. It's through this new innovation that provides the film with its best or most memorable moments, too: the struggle and screams of a woman in peril and her artist seducer, off screen and veiled by a violently swaying curtain (because we now have sound as well as visuals to denote action); in another scene, as the camera dwells on our victim/killer's guilty face, who is about to cut bread, the monotonous monologue of a local gossip is muffled entirely save for the repeated use of the word "knife", heightening both the on-screen character's guilt and our sympathy for her; and also, in the lack of sound, in order to invoke tension - in one scene in particular, when our lovers are initially blackmailed in the empty (and silent) store, with acres of space between the three of them and the traffic from outside heard only when the entrance is opened. It's doubly interesting throughout, being both an amalgamation of Hitchcock's European aesthetic influences (British documentary, Soviet montage, German expressionism (which in turn define British national cinema at the time)), and in its complex and invitingly ambiguous moral (dis)solution: at the end of it all, the lowly blackmailer is dead and forgotten, with the policeman and his lover the ones who deviate from the truth and make it to their own ends - and therefore a shift in audience sympathies. It's one of his most subtle and impressive works.